It’s nicknamed the autohell tools for a reason.

It’s neat but most of its functionality is completely useless to most people. The autotools are so old I think they even predate Linux itself, so it’s designed for portability between UNIXes of the time, so it checks the compiler’s capabilities and supported features and tries to find paths. That also wildly predate package managers, so they were the official way to install things so there was also a need to make sure to check for dependencies, find dependencies, and all that stuff. Nowadays you might as well just want to write a PKGBUILD if you want to install it, or a Dockerfile. Just no need to check for 99% of the stuff the autotools check. Everything it checks for has probably been standard compiler features for at least the last decade, and the package manager can ensure you have the build dependencies present.

Ultimately you eventually end up generating a Makefile via M4 macros through that whole process, so the Makefiles that get generated look as good as any other generated Makefiles from the likes of CMake and Meson. So you might as well just go for your hand written Makefile, and use a better tool when it’s time to generate a Makefile.

(If only c++ build systems caught up to Golang lol)

At least it’s not node_modules

Yeah, and you’re pinging from server to client with no client connected. Ping from the client first to open the connection, or set keep alives on the client.

Your peer have no endpoint configured so the client needs to connect to the server first for it to know where the client is. Try from the client, and it’ll work for a bit both ways.

You’ll want the persistent keepalive option on the client side to keep the tunnel alive.

They should be in /run/systemd along the rest of generated units.

I think it is a circular problem.

Another example that comes to mind: the sanctions on Huawei and whether Google would be considered to be supplying software because Android is open-source. At the very least any contributions from Huawei is unlikely to be accepted into AOSP. The EU is also becoming problematic with their whole software origin and quality certifications they’re trying to impose.

This leads to exactly what you said: national forks. In Huawei’s case that’s HarmonyOS.

I think we need to get back to being anonymous online, as if you’re anonymous nobody knows where you’re from and your contributions should be based solely on its merit. The legal framework just isn’t set up for an environment like the Internet that severely blurs the lines between borders and no clear “this company is supplying this company in the enemy country”.

Governments can’t control it, and they really hate it.

The problem isn’t even where the software is officially based, it can become a problem for individual contributors too.

PGP for example used to be problematic because US exports control on encryption used to forbid exporting systems capable of strong encryption because the US wanted to be able to break it when it’s used by others. Sending the tarball of the PGP software by an american to the soviets at the time would have been considered treason against the US, let alone letting them contribute to it. Heck, sharing 3D printable gun models with a foreign country can probably be considered supplying weapons like they’re real guns. So even if Linux was based in a more neutral country not subject to US sanctions, the sanctions would make it illegal to use or contribute to it anyway.

As much as we’d love to believe in the FOSS utopia that transcends nationality, the reality is we all live in real countries with laws that restrict what we can do. Ultimately the Linux maintainers had to do what’s best for the majority of the community, which mostly lives in NATO countries honoring the sanctions against Russia and China.

No. It could repair some files to make them playable, maybe, by extrapolating sections before and after, like a couple seconds missing there and there in a movie, but all bets are off as to whether it’ll guess right. I’m not aware of such tool existing.

But if it’s a zip file, there’s no chance it can fix it. It’s much different than AI upscaling, because you don’t just need to find an answer that’s close enough, you need the exact bits because even one value off could mean the gravity of the whole game is off, as an example. If some files are encrypted then all bets are off, as that would imply breaking encryption.

Also I’d look at what’s the missing data. Sometimes you can be stuck at 99% because the only seeder left didn’t download a readme file or something but the whole content is there.

The camera is straight up disconnecting from the USB bus. A bad driver could cause it to get confused and reset itself. And that would be the uvcvideo kernel module, userspace shouldn’t be able to crash the camera.

Since downgrading the kernel didn’t help, and it also doesn’t work on other distros, I’d consider the possibility your webcam just died.

Are you able to make it work on any distro, or even Windows?

There’s some value in having open-source clients to proprietary services. Of course ideally one would avoid using them, but since many are stuck with games they already purchased and the launcher was bolted on later in an update, it makes sense.

At the very least it probably doesn’t implement a lot of the telemetry, and it doesn’t require you to figure out how to make the launcher work under Proton, only the game.

Less proprietary is better than nothing.

Everyone’s approaching this from the privacy aspect, but the real reason isn’t that the cashier thought you were weird, they’re just underpaid and under a lot of pressure from management to try multiple times and in some cases they even get written up for not doing it because it’s deemed part of their job. They hate it just as much as you. Same when you try to cancel your cable subscription or whatever: the calls are recorded and their performance is monitored and they make damn sure they try at least 3 times to upsell you, even when it’s painfully obvious you’re done with them.

Just politely decline until they asked however many times they’re required to ask and move on.

With Docker, the internal network is just a bridge interface. The reason most firewall rules don’t apply is a combination of:

• Containers have their own namespace including network namespace, so each container have a blank iptables just for them.
• For container communication, that goes through the FORWARD table, not the INPUT/OUTPUT ones.
• Docker adds its own rules to ensure that this works as expected.

The only thing that should be affected by the host firewall is the proxy service Docker uses to listen on a port on the host and send it to the container.

When using Docker, each container acts like an independent machine, and your host gets configured to act as a router. You can firewall Docker containers, the rules just need to be in the right place to work.

The sandboxing is almost always better because it’s an extra layer.

Even if you gain root inside the container, you’re not necessarily even root on the host. So you have to exploit some software that has a known vulnerable library, trigger that in that single application that uses this particular library version, root or escape the container, and then root the host too.

The most likely outcome is it messes up your home folder and anything your user have access to, but more likely less.

Also, something with a known vulnerability doesn’t mean it’s triggerable. If you use say, a zip library and only use it to decompress your own assets, then it doesn’t matter what bugs it has, it will only ever decompress that one known good zip file. It’s only a problem if untrusted files gets involved that you can trick the user in causing them to be opened and trigger the exploit.

It’s not ideal to have outdated dependencies, but the sandboxing helps a lot, and the fact only a few apps have known vulnerable libraries further reduces the attack surface. You start having to chain a lot of exploits to do anything meaningful, and at that point you target those kind of efforts to bigger more valuable targets.

You can’t, at that point you assume your correspondent is compromised. It’s not just recall but also malware and credential stealers. Doesn’t matter if recall is taking screenshots, if the messaging client itself is pwned via malware then they have full access to as much history as is available.

You can block them and over time it should get better, or you can write a script that does some checks and blocks them for you.

No, if you deleted the btrfs driver it would simply fail to mount due to the missing driver, if it’s a separate module in the first place. Same with LUKS, if you don’t have the tools or the drivers installed for it, it’ll just not mount it. You’d have to be accessing the drive directly with something like dd to corrupt it.

The error says /home is a symlink, what if you ls -l /home?

Since this is an atomic distro, /home might be a symlink to /var/home.

Docker, Distrobox, Toybox, systemd-nspawn, chroot.

Technically those all rely on the same kernel namespace features, just different ways to use it.

That’s also what Flatpaks and Snaps do. If you only care about package bloat, an AppImage would do too but it’s not a sandbox like Flatpak.

auto rollbacks and easy switching between states.

That’s the beauty of snapshots, you can boot them. So you just need GRUB to generate the correct menu and you can boot any arbitrary version of your system. On the ZFS side of things there’s zfsbootmenu, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it for btrfs too. You don’t even need rsync, you can use ssh $server btrfs send | btrfs recv and it should in theory be faster too (btrfs knows if you only modified one block of a big file).

and the current r/w system as the part that gets updated.

That kind of goes against the immutable thing. What I’d do is make a script that mounts a fork of the current snapshot readwrite into a temporary directory, chroot into it, install packages, exit chroot, unmount and then commit those changes as a snapshot. That’s the closest I can think of that’s easy to DIY that’s basically what rpm-ostree install does. It does it differently (daemon that manages hardlinks), but filesystem snapshots basically do the same thing without the extra work.

However, I think it would be good to use OStree

I found this, maybe it’ll help: https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/adapting-existing/

It looks like the fundamental is the same, temporary directory you run the package manager into and then you commit the changes. So you can probably make it work with Debian if you want to spend the time.

All you really have to do for that is mount the partition readonly, and have a designated writable data partition for the rest. That can be as simple as setting it ro in your fstab.

How you ship updates can take many forms. If you don’t need your distro atomic, you can temporarily remount readwrite, rsync the new version over and make it readonly again. If you want it atomic, there’s the classic A/B scheme (Android, SteamOS), where you just download the image to the inactive partition and then just switch over when it’s ready to boot into. You can also do btrfs/ZFS snapshots, where the current system is forked off a snapshot. On your builder you just make your changes, then take a snapshot, then zfs/btrfs send it as a snapshot to all your other machines and you just boot off that new snapshot (readonly). It’s really not that magic: even Docker, if you dig deep enough, it’s just essentially tarballs being downloaded then extracted each in their own folder, and the layering actually comes from stacking them with overlayfs. What rpm-ostree does, from a quick glance at the docs, is they leverage the immutability and just build a new version of the filesystem using hardlinks and you just switch root to it. If you’ve ever opened an rpm or deb file, it’s just a regular tarball and the contents pretty much maps directly to the filesytem.

Here’s an Arch package example, but rpm/deb are about the same:

max-p@desktop /v/c/p/aur> tar -tvf zfs-utils-2.2.6-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
-rw-r--r-- root/root    114771 2024-10-13 01:43 .BUILDINFO
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/bash_completion.d/
-rw-r--r-- root/root     15136 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/bash_completion.d/zfs
-rw-r--r-- root/root     15136 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/bash_completion.d/zpool
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/default/
-rw-r--r-- root/root      4392 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/default/zfs
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/
-rw-r--r-- root/root       165 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf.alias.example
-rw-r--r-- root/root       166 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf.multipath.example
-rw-r--r-- root/root       616 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf.sas_direct.example
-rw-r--r-- root/root       152 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf.sas_switch.example
-rw-r--r-- root/root       254 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf.scsi.example
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2024-10-13 01:43 etc/zfs/zed.d/
...

It’s beautifully simple. You could for example install ArchLinux without pacman, by mostly just tar -x the individual package files directly to /. All the package manager does is track which file is owned by which package (so it’s easier to remove), and dependency solving so it knows to go pull more stuff or it won’t work, and mirror/download management.

How you get that set up is all up to you. Packer+Ansible can make you disk images and you can maybe just throw them on a web server and download them and dd them to the inactive partition of an A/B scheme, and that’d be quite distro-agnostic too. You could build the image as a Docker container and export it as a tarball. You can build a chroot. Or a systemd-nspawn instance. You can also just install a VM yourself and set it up to your liking and then just dd the disk image to your computers.

If you want some information on how SteamOS does it, https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/

I’m talking about the new one they made from scratch in Rust: https://system76.com/cosmic